MLK's Niece: Civil Rights Leader Would Call for Talk, Not Terror

Civil-rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would react to the Paris terror attacks by urging the use of words — not violence — to settle conflicts, his niece, Dr. Alveda King, told Newsmax TV on Friday.

"If my uncle were here today, he would read in the Bible, 'A one-blood God made all people to dwell on the face of the earth.' If we're all one blood, then we're related," King said on "The Steve Malzberg Show."

"Martin Luther King Jr. said we must learn to live together as . . . brothers and sisters and not really separate races. We have the ability to use our words to heal and not destroy."

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But King, a civil-rights activist and pastoral associate and director of African-American outreach for the Priests for Life and Gospel of Life Ministries, added that in order to end violence, people must be willing to listen.

"Jesus said if you want to be great in God's kingdom, you need to be a servant of all," she said.

"Right now, nobody wants to serve anybody. Everybody wants to be heard, everybody wants to be right, and so that's giving us these problems."

King said the ongoing violence in Paris — which began with the slaughter of 12 people at a satirical magazine that had made fun of the Prophet Muhammad — has made her reflect on conflicts in her own family.

"I keep thinking about my little grandchildren and when they get into their disputes and when they say something that hurts someone's feelings or when someone disagrees," she said.

"We'll say don't push, don't hit, don't react, and don't use your words to kill, communicate. When they do that, the violence de-escalates, it goes down.

"We're not using our words effectively right now, and we're not using them in a positive way."

While she supports free speech, King said, "We need to be careful about satire because it can be received in different ways . . . it still comes back to communicating as if we're related to each other in this human race."

Martin Luther King Jr. — who helped organize the historic Selma-to-Montgomery and March-on-Washington demonstrations for African-American civil rights — was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.